The present invention relates to wireless device suitable for multiple wireless standards and protocols.
Portable devices such as laptop personal computers, personal digital assistants (PDA), mobile internet devices (MID), cellular phones, and smart phones with wireless data communication capability are being developed in ever increasing functions and features for convenience access to the Internet and other data ports. The existence of different wireless standards in the world, however, prevents one wireless device to be used across all regions of the world. For example, cellular phones can operate understand standards such as CDMA, WCDMA, GSM, WiMax, LTE, IMT-2000, WiBro, and WiFi. Different wireless standards also can operate in different frequency bands and thus require different hardware components. Different wireless standards also include different software algorithms for signal encoding and decoding. As a result, the current mobile devices are designed to operate under a specific wireless standard adopted in a specific region of the world.
Referring to FIG. 1, a conventional cellular phone 100 can include a power amplifier 110, an antenna 120 for transmitting radio frequency (RF) signals output from the power amplifier 110, a Tx/Rx switch 120 for controlling the transmission and reception of the RF signals, an RF transceiver 130 for up and down convert between the modulated signals and RF signals, a memory 150, a base band processor 160 for processing digital signals, and an application processor 170. The base band processor 160 and the application processor 170 can be implemented by software in a general processor such as a central processor unit. These components are typically implemented as integrated circuits (IC) on separate semiconductor chips that are mounted on a printer circuit board (PCB). The different components are connected by a control and data bus 180 on the PCB board. The base band processor 130 and the application processor 170 are designed to encode and decode digital signals for the intended wireless standard. The power amplifier 110 and the transceiver 160 are optimized to operate in the frequency band(s) defined in the intended wireless standard.
In view of the above discussions, a need still exists for a flexible wireless device that can be used for different wireless standards across different frequency bands throughout the world.